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This volume presents the papers from the 13th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), held in Glasgow, Scotland, from October 11-13, 2006. The symposium serves as a platform for both emerging and established researchers to share original contributions in various fields, including string processing (such as dictionary algorithms, text searching, pattern matching, text compression, text mining, natural language processing, and automata-based processing) and information retrieval (covering IR modeling, indexing, ranking, interface design, visualization, cross-lingual systems, multimedia IR, digital libraries, collaborative retrieval, XML, and semi-structured data). Additionally, it explores the intersection of biology and computation, including applications in molecular biology, evolution, gene recognition, and protein structure prediction. From 102 submissions across over 20 countries, 26 full papers were accepted, resulting in an acceptance rate of about 25%. The Program Committee also included 5 short papers due to the high quality of submissions. The symposium featured talks by invited speakers Jamie Callan from Carnegie Mellon University and Martin Farach-Colton from Rutgers University.

CoLIS 5 was the ? fth in the series of international conferences whose general aim is to provide a broad forum for critically exploring and analyzing research inareassuchascomputerscience, informationscienceandlibraryscience. CoLIS examinesthehistorical, theoretical, empiricalandtechnicalissuesrelatingtoour understanding and use of information, promoting an interdisciplinary approach to research. CoLIS seeks to provide a broad platform for the examination of context as it relates to our theoretical, empirical and technical development of information-centered disciplines. The theme for CoLIS 5 was the nature, impact and role of context within information-centered research. Context is a complex, dynamic and multi- - mensional concept that in? uences both humans and machines: how they behave individually and how they interact with each other. In CoLIS 5 we took an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of context to help us understand and the theoretical approaches to modelling and understanding context, incorporate contextual reasoning within technology, and develop a shared framework for promoting the exploration of context.

The ongoing migration of computing and information access from the desktop and te- phone to mobile computing devices such as PDAs, tablet PCs, and next-generation (3G) phones poses critical challenges for research on information access. Desktop computer users are now used to accessing vast quantities of complex data either directly on their PC or via the Internet – with many services now blurring that distinction. The current state-of-practice of mobile computing devices, be they mobile phones, hand-held computers, or personal digital assistants (PDAs), is very variable. Most mobile phones have no or very limited information storage and very poor Internet access. Furthermore, very few end-users make any, never mind extensive, use of the services that are provided. Hand-held computers, on the other hand, tend to have no wireless network capabilities and tend to be used very much as electronic diaries, with users tending not to go beyond basic diary applications.

The annual colloquium on information retrieval research provides an opportunity for both new and established researchers to present papers describing work in progress or ? nal results. This colloquium was established by the BCS IRSG(B- tish Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group), and named the Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. Recently, the location of the colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and continental Europe. To re? ect the growing European orientation of the event, the colloquium was renamed “European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research” from 2001. Since the inception of the colloquium in 1979 the event has been hosted in the city of Glasgow on four separate occasions. However, this was the ? rst time that the organization of the colloquium had been jointly undertaken by three separate computer and information science departments; an indication of the collaborative nature and diversity of IR research within the universities of the West of Scotland. The organizers of ECIR 2002 saw a sharp increase in the number of go- quality submissions in answer to the call for papers over previous years and as such 52 submitted papers were each allocated 3 members of the program committee for double blind review of the manuscripts. A total of 23 papers were eventually selected for oral presentation at the colloquium in Glasgow which gave an acceptance rate of less than 45% and ensured a very high standard of the papers presented.

Information retrieval (IR) aims at defining systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of stored information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of documents to users' information needs, expressed by means of a query. This is a very difficult and complex task, since it is pervaded with imprecision and uncertainty. Most of the existing IR systems offer a very simple model of IR, which privileges efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. A promising direction to increase the effectiveness of IR is to model the concept of „partially intrinsic“ in the IR process and to make the systems adaptive, i. e. able to „learn“ the user's concept of relevance. To this aim, the application of soft computing techniques can be of help to obtain greater flexibility in IR systems.